Fall 1826
NOHANT
Less than one year after we had vowed to repair our marriage, I sat with Casimir in the parlor after dinner, trying not to let anger overtake reason. I had just learned that he had lost thirty thousand francs of my marriage settlement by investing it in a nonexistent merchant ship; he had been swindled. Casimir’s father had died the past winter, and his stepmother had not seen fit to give my husband anything. He was totally reliant on my fortune, and now he had lost a significant amount of it.
A number of things came to my mind, but in the end I elected to say only this: “We are finished with you running this place. Starting now, I will take over.”
I expected an argument, but I did not get one. Instead, Casimir rose heavily from his chair and walked out of the room. Then I heard the front door slam, followed by the pounding of his horse’s hooves. He would be going to Château de Montgivray to see my brother, I was sure of it, and he and Hippolyte would drink themselves into oblivion. Or at least that is what he would tell me. In fact, it was more likely that he would be going to see Hippolyte’s wife’s maid, a young and beautiful Spanish woman who had once worked at Nohant, and with whom I knew Casimir was intimate. I had found her in bed with him on a day when I returned home earlier than expected from one of my shopping trips to Paris. I fired her immediately, fired her as she stood in the middle of the room weeping, a sheet wrapped hastily around herself. Later that night, Casimir tried to persuade me to take her back. “Be reasonable,” he said. “You know these things happen.” I would not take her back, and so Hippolyte hired her.
Most of the time, my marriage felt like trying to hold on to fog. Worse, at least so far as I was concerned, there was little to Aurélien and me any longer, either. His letters had cooled markedly in tone; I felt sure that he had found someone with whom his passions need not be sanitized or relegated to black lines on a white page.
A year passed this way. My health began to suffer; I had frequent chest pains and migraines. I resolved to go to Paris for medical consultations and found someone willing to accompany me there. That was Jules de Grandsagne, the brother of Stéphane, the young man with whom, as a girl, I had delved into the mysteries and glories of the body when he had instructed me in my room at Nohant. I would go in late December, and Jules said he was sure Stéphane would like to see me. As I would him.
December 27, 1827
PARIS
“Aurore!” Stéphane de Grandsagne stepped aside from the door and gestured to the interior of his apartment. I came in and moved a pile of books from a tattered gold velvet settee so that I could sit there. Then I took full measure of a man who had lost none of his attractiveness, despite his gauntness and the dark circles beneath his eyes. His muttonchops made still more pronounced the height of his cheekbones. His dark hair was still thick and curly, his nose straight, and his lower lip full. Nor had he lost a way of looking at me that was thrilling.
“How goes the collection?” I asked. On the way to Paris, his brother had told me of the efforts Stéphane was making toward building a people’s library. “He’s working himself to death!” Jules had said. Stéphane wanted to provide at least two hundred books, on every subject, so that working men and women who were otherwise denied access to advanced schooling could educate themselves. I had come to visit Stéphane to congratulate him on his enterprise and to see if there was anything I might do to help. But I also came because I remembered him as someone to whom I could speak intimately and openly, a true friend.
“We have made great progress, and I am pleased,” Stéphane said. “But you, Aurore, I see that you are…Are you unwell?”
To my chagrin, tears began to stream down my face.
He pulled me up from the settee and into his arms, and kissed me.
I protested not at all. Not in the slightest. And a full hour later, when I arose from his bed, I observed with wonder that nothing in my body or soul hurt; it was as though Asclepius had laid his hand upon my brow and offered me his mythical cure.
But the next day, on the way back to Nohant, I stared out the window of the coach and was overwhelmed with remorse. I knew immediately, as I had known with Maurice: I was pregnant.
When Solange was born, I saw that Stéphane’s features were unmistakably in her face: she looked nothing like Casimir and not even like me. Yet the only one who directly questioned me about this was Aurélien de Sèze, who happened to visit us at the time of Solange’s birth. Casimir bore him no jealous grudges any longer.
As Aurélien sat alone with me in my room and Solange lay sleeping on my breast, he gently laid his hand on the top of the baby’s head and stroked her hair with his little finger. I was reminded of the softness of his touch.
“She is beautiful,” he said. Then he sat back in his chair and regarded me seriously. “Behind your back, people are saying that the child is Stéphane de Grandsagne’s.”
“Yes. I know they are.”
“Is it true?”
I didn’t answer.
“Do you love him?” he asked, and I heard the pain in his voice.
My eyes filled. “It’s you I love,” I whispered. “Still.”
Now it was his turn to be silent. I didn’t know if it was because his own feelings had changed or if he simply had not heard me. I did not repeat myself. He stood, started to speak, but then did not. He kissed my forehead gently and left the room. I continued to stare at the chair where he had been sitting and quietly wept, until Solange awakened and I turned all of my attention to her. Never mind that it was someone else who had conceived her with me; Casimir was her father and my husband. I would persevere. I would overcome. This deception would be woven into Casimir’s and my life together; after a while, we would not notice it. We were civil enough. But from now on, Casimir and I would have separate bedrooms. That much truth I had to allow.
December 1830
NOHANT
The writing I did in my little room at nohant was progressing. What once had been random observations and journal entries were becoming pieces of fiction that took on a kind of authority of their own. I learned that wind informed, that memory informed, that hopes and dreams did. So, too, a fork on a plate, an unopened letter, the shine of wet on cobblestoned streets—all of these could help shape a story.
Solange was now two, an imperious toddler who at bathtime inspected her belly button with the gravitas of a field marshal sizing up his troops. She offered me toys with an emphatic thrust that on occasion nearly knocked me down.
Maurice was a young philosopher who told me on his seventh birthday, “Now I have entered my first old age.”
Together, they ran and shouted and played all day; at night, when I tucked them into bed, I was grateful for the fact that they had both a mother and a father here with them.
Sometimes, when there was peace between Casimir and me—if, say, we sat together in the parlor while the wind lashed the trees and rain drummed hard on the roof and thunder boomed and lightning lit up the sky so brightly one needed to close one’s eyes against it, or if one of our children did something that made us smile at each other—at such times, I would chastise myself for ever wanting anything more, or for having made declarations and demands one moment that I only regretted making the next. From the time I’d been a child, I had wanted to probe and comprehend the mysteries of life. I had wanted an elemental loneliness to be taken away by an abiding and comprehensive love; I had wanted, too, to know an ecstasy that would last forever.
But perhaps I needed to think about what I had. And perhaps I needed to understand that one could not look for a constant when life—and people—were ever changing.
January 1831
NOHANT
One morning when I was on my way to Paris to visit my mother, I went into Casimir’s study to tell him goodbye. He was not there, but on his desk was an envelope with my name on it, with instructions not to open it until his death. It was his will, I was sure, and for a moment my heart was full of tenderness f
or him. I was moved as one always is when considering the death of someone near. Casimir had told me he was writing a new will, so as to include certain provisions for the children.
I opened the envelope, feeling that, since it was addressed to me, it was my privilege. But when I saw what he had written, the blood left my head. It was not a will at all. Rather, it was a letter to be given to me after his death, and it was full of vitriol. He had detailed transgressions fueled by my “perversity.” He had expressed his disgust and total disregard for my person.
I had brought myself to a kind of peace in our marriage. But now I had to admit the truth: we were a couple ill-bound by strained tolerance on one side and hatred on the other. Casimir did not occasionally find me disappointing or irritating or vexing and then return to an abiding affection for me. I saw now that he had stayed with me for my fortune, nothing more.
He lacked the courage to speak the truth to me in life, but he had no compunction about saying it after his death, when his letter, so full of rage and maledictions, would hurt me more—and when he would not have to defend himself against any response of mine. He was cruel, and he was a coward.
It was enough. I thought, I will leave him. Whatever sorrow or defeat may have been in that decision, it was overshadowed by relief.
I considered my options. If I told Casimir I wanted the children half of the time, he would fight me. So as a ruse, I would tell him I was going to live full-time in Paris, without the children. This would frighten him into some sort of compromise I would not be able to effect otherwise.
My old habit of optimism took over: I moved quickly to the door and out, the letter in my hand. In the hallway, I came upon Casimir, his cheeks red from the cold, his spirit jaunty. When he saw what I was holding, he stopped in his tracks. “Aurore,” he began, his tone split between reprimand and apology.
I handed him the letter and said calmly, “I’m leaving you and the children to go and live alone in Paris.”
So it was that the day came when I heard the sound of the carriage wheels crunching on the gravel, and I walked out of the house at Nohant to start a new life, to start living.
September 1834
NOHANT
Having left my life in Paris to come to Nohant, I lay by the river, very near the place where Marie and I had bathed the summer when she’d visited. The children were playing in the woods. I had kissed them many times before I’d separated from them that morning, until they’d finally pulled away from me in exasperation. Maurice was eleven, and outgrowing his tolerance for what he saw as excessive maternal affection, and six-year-old Solange was ever in the habit of pulling away from me.
I had kissed my children so earnestly because I was saying goodbye. A melancholy more extreme than any I had ever felt had come upon me. I could find no relief even in writing. The fantasies that had flowed effortlessly from me from the time I sat in my improvised playpen were coming to me no longer. I sat at night before the white pages I used to fill with stories, and nothing came. Nothing.
I was thirty years old and felt old as time. I had failed in every love relationship I had attempted: with my mother, with God, with marriage, with Aurélien, with lovers, with my children. And with Marie, whose light still shone brightest for me, who still seemed the one with whom I might have been enduringly happy. These days, I enjoyed her company in friendship and no longer aspired to anything beyond it; I would have embarrassed myself in attempting it, and I had no doubt that any attempt at rekindling romantic love would have turned her away from me entirely. She had finished with that the day she’d left Nohant, and I knew perhaps better than anyone that it was always easy for Marie to leave behind what no longer engaged or amused her.
Marie was gone. Musset was gone. One is not living when one does not use the parts of oneself that are most vital, most especially the need to love and be loved. In that respect, I was already dead.
I stood and watched the river run past, imagining lying on the silty bottom and letting my lungs fill with water. I imagined the peace of nothingness, a lifting of the weight I found lying across my chest when I awakened every day. I took a step closer to the water’s edge.
And then something happened that was as startling as what I experienced in the convent chapel. I heard above me a great and sudden rising up of sound, a euphoric trilling of what must have been one hundred birds in the tree beneath which I had lain. I watched them fly away as though on cue, and the despair I had been feeling seemed to fly off with them. At first I stood immobile, afraid to believe that this had happened. But then I became full of an invigorating resolve and walked quickly back to the house.
At the beginning of October, I would return to Paris and put Maurice back in school. I would enroll Solange at a boarding school I knew of where the classes were small, and where I hoped she would profit from the discipline and the structure. I saw that I had been making that most common mistake of a parent who feels unappreciated: that of being lax and indulgent in an effort to be loved, when it is the opposite behavior that encourages a child’s adulation.
That morning, I had received a letter Musset had sent me a few days ago from Baden, where he was trying to cure himself from the effects of his hard living. Over and over again, I had read his grieving lines:
Tell me that you give to me your lips, your teeth, your hair yes, all of them, and that head which I have held between my hands. Say, oh say, that you embrace me—you—me. Oh God! When I think of these things a lump comes into my throat, my eyes grow dim, my knees tremble. It is horrible to love as I love! How thirsty, George, how thirsty I am for you!
I had felt it best not to encourage him and, nearly numb, had written that we must never meet again. Now I would tell him otherwise.
October 1834
PARIS
Alfred and I met again and very soon afterward resumed our physical relationship. But then he began drinking in excess, and he told me it was because he had learned—from Pagello telling everyone—that the good doctor and I had been intimate before Musset left Italy, not only afterward; I had lied to Alfred. And so I admitted it, thinking that this would be the end of it. Instead, it started a new cycle of abuse.
Without warning, Alfred would go into a sulk and at those times pepper me with questions about the lovemaking between Pagello and me. At first, I tried to remain calm, but then I grew angry. What right, I asked, had he to chastise me about being with another after he had rejected me?
We had been back together for only a few days when I hurled this question to him, and he erupted into one of his famous rages and stood nose to nose with me to scream, “You will never understand me or, indeed, any man! My God, George, your naïveté astounds me! How I regret my time with you—all of it! Again we are come to this: I no longer love you. Who could love such an unfaithful and selfish being whose only thought is for herself and her desires? At least the other whores I see admit to their true natures and professions! I am finished with you. Do not attempt to contact me.”
He slammed out of the apartment. For weeks, I stayed in Paris, hoping we would resolve things. After all, he had done this before: denounced me and then rushed back to me to proclaim his love. I thought Musset did love me, and it was the devils in his nature (and of his acquaintance) who sometimes talked him into pushing me away. I sent him notes of love, then of anguish, to which he made no reply.
For diversion and to lift my spirits, I agreed to sit for the artist Eugène Delacroix, who had been commissioned to paint my portrait for the Revue. I felt an instant bond with that great and handsome man. He seemed leonine to me, with his overhang of brow, his great head of tousled black hair, and the narrow strip of beard he wore directly down the line of the deep dimple in his chin. There was wisdom and compassion in his dark eyes, as well as a kind of knowingness that made one feel seen to one’s core. It was a disquieting ability he had. Marie once said of him, “Most men look at me clothed and imagine my body naked; he looks past my body straight to my naked soul.”
> Although Delacroix was inordinately perceptive, he had the strength of character not to use what he saw in any sort of manipulative way. I trusted him from the moment I laid eyes upon him, and when I sat for him that first time I began to pour my heart out to him about Alfred. But I had hardly begun my story when he exclaimed, “Ah, yes, Alfred Musset, the poet. An extraordinarily gifted young man, not only in literature but in art. He could make his living as an artist, I have no doubt. Did he ever mention wanting to do so to you? For if he would like, I could take him under my wing.”
“No, he only amuses himself with drawing. He does not want to commit himself to it. His first love…” My throat tightened, and Delacroix looked up from his easel.
“His first love is poetry.” And then, to save myself, I changed the subject: “I should like to invite you to come sometime to my country home at Nohant. I believe you would enjoy painting there in any season.”
“Perhaps this winter, I shall.”
“Do; I shall set up studio space for you.”
I made sure we avoided the subject of Alfred for the rest of our visits, and at the last sitting I secured Delacroix’s address so that I could write to him when I was back at Nohant.
A few nights later, I visited Marie in her dressing room. We spoke about Alfred and me. As jilted lovers do, I looked for my mistakes, wondered aloud about how things might have gone in a different direction if only, examined aspects of the relationship from every side.
How many broken women, I wonder, begin sentences with, “But he said…”
When I said that to Marie, she burst out loudly, “ ‘But he said,’ ‘But he said,’ ‘But he said!’ When did he say it? In your arms! Or seeking to be in your arms!
“Ah, George. In this state of arousal men are as wild-eyed as a dog with a steak over his head, and as the dog will do any trick he knows to get his meat, so will a man. He will tell you anything. And when he has spilled himself inside you, you will swear it was his brains that were left there, for he will have little or no memory of the amorous words that sprang forth from him. Or if he does remember, it will be because he has memorized them to use on such occasions.” She laughed. “I tell you, their acting ability at such times makes me look like an amateur! If only I could watch them and take notes. See how he lowers his lids to murmur these words of love! See how he runs his fingers through her hair! And this growl, emanating from deep within; how he has perfected the tone so as not to be frightening but exciting! Regard le tigre! And now cue the trumpets, here comes the charge of the penis, the wild clenching and unclenching of the buttocks! What exhilaration in the rhythm of the ride, what calculated intensity, how this maestro conducts his little orchestra of body parts!”
The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand Page 27